Why:

• SimplePie is not maintained anymore, last active commit phase was a year ago, last commit 6 months ago
• From the roughly 4 pull requests that we sent none were merged nor did we receive any response from the developer
• I've notified the developer of a serious XSS issue (had to use Twitter because there's no official way to do this) in their sanitizer which has not been fixed (half a year now?)
• It uses a registry which is an antipattern (global)
• Documentation is bad for replacing stuff like sanitation
• You have to call methods on the main class after you call the constructor for configuration (woot?)
• Init fetches the feed, if it fails it returns false. It is impossible to tell why it failed, it just returns false (exceptions, hello?)

So I think it's time to throw it out and replace it with something better.

Some alternative feed parsers that Ive found til now:

• https://github.com/fguillot/picoFeed
• http://framework.zend.com/manual/2.3/en/index.html#zend-feed

Please review and post other rss/atom libs

Criteria:

• Proxy support?
• RSS + ATOM support?
• Is it possible to turn off sanitation (we use htmlpurifier, speedup)?
• Caching?
• Free of globals and Anti-Patterns, as in: Singleton, Registry, Service Locator?
• Actively maintained?
• Free of severe bugs?
• Is it used in applications?
• How much code is there/is it easy to modified?
• Does it have tests?
• Forgiving parser?
• Good documentation?
• PHP 5.3 support?
• Possible to set useragent?
• Proper error reporting?
• Additional dependencies (currently used: DOM, XML, curl)?
  @cosenal @icewind1991 @nerzhul

Choice: picoFeed

picoFeed seems to be the way to go just waiting for this issue to be resolved: https://github.com/fguillot/picoFeed/issues/46

Things to do afterwards:

• Create a config in the application.php which also reads proxy settings, see News doesn't support proxies #637
• Use the Client class from picoFeed to scrap website content in the XPathArticleEnhancer.php
• Get rid of the favicon fetcher and use the Favicon class from picoFeed to get the favicon
• Create a fetcher that uses the picoFeed
• Get rid of SimplePie
• Fix tests
• Umlaut issues: https://github.com/fguillot/picoFeed/issues/49
• Slashdot enhancer not working
• Bring back caching